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Britains Countryside Killers - Season 2 - Episode 02: A Monster in Plain Sight
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00:02In the rural village of Brocham, Surrey, 14-year-old Roy Tuttle vanishes on his way home from school.
00:10One evening, though, when he's age 14, in April 1968, he doesn't come home.
00:16It was so unusual for somebody to go missing, especially a child who was hitchhiking home,
00:21and they just assumed he would return home.
00:23And then three days later, on the 26th of April, the unthinkable happened.
00:27A forestry worker found Roy's body.
00:31There's an absolute shockwave through the community.
00:34People were looking at each other in the street thinking, how could this happen here?
00:38Despite the tireless efforts of Surrey police, the investigation stalls and the case eventually goes cold.
00:45You've looked at all of the leads that you've got. They've all come to a dead end.
00:48Have to start shutting things down.
00:51Abilities in DNA and forensics had moved on.
00:55They were able to deliver a DNA profile and a breakthrough in this historic and unsolved case.
01:05Take a minute.
01:29We've been timing.
01:30We'll see you again.
01:30We'll see you then.
01:30We'll see you then.
01:38BROCHEM is a village and civil parish in the Mole Valley district of Surrey in England.
01:44It's a very picturesque village. It has the River Mole running through it and
01:48it is a very idyllic place to live with about two and a half thousand people living there.
01:54It's a village which has its own identity and a great history of the church that dates back
01:59to the 13th century, one of the most photographed and picturesque cricket grounds in the country.
02:04It's right on the North Downs, very close to Box Hill, which is made famous by a scene in Jane
02:11Austen's
02:11novel Emma. In terms of crime, this is a very low crime area. You're looking at potentially a bike
02:18theft, occasional fight outside a pub, that kind of thing. This is an area to raise children happily
02:23and safely. This is an area that you'd probably retire from if you'd lived in London for many years.
02:28This is an area that's quite close to the big city, but it's definitely far enough away
02:32that it's quiet, peaceful and safe.
02:36In 1968, 14-year-old Roy Tuttle lives in Brockham with his family.
02:42Raising a family in that area are Hillary and Dennis Tuttle. They already have one older son,
02:48Colin, and in 1954, they have a younger son, Roy Tuttle.
02:54Roy Tuttle, a 14-year-old boy known as Tuts to his friends, he was the son of Dennis and
02:59Hillary Tuttle.
03:00He also had a brother, Colin, and they were a very close, very happy family.
03:06The Tuttles were a very close family of four. Roy was a little bit shy, a bit reserved. He didn't
03:12really go to the scouts or anything, any clubs or activities, but to those who did know him,
03:17he was your run-of-the-mill teenage lad. He was good to be around, happy-go-lucky,
03:21just mischievous, as all teenage boys are.
03:25Roy'd been going to Kingston Grammar School, which is a famous old school with a famous old school uniform.
03:30It's a bright red blazer with grey stripes. This is very unusual for a British school,
03:36and it's very, very distinctive in the area. Children go from many miles away.
03:40The Tuttle's lived around 15 miles from this particular school, and anyone in the area
03:45immediately recognised children wearing this red and grey blazer as Kingston Grammar Boys.
03:51So Roy and Colin both attended Kingston Grammar School. In order to get there,
03:56they would take a bus part of the route, but then they would hitch the rest of the way. And
04:01this
04:01was because Roy was saving for a bicycle, and him and his brother Colin were saving for a train
04:06set as well. So they'd use the money for their bus fare in order to save for these things that
04:11they
04:11wanted. For some context, back in the late 60s, hitchhiking wasn't as taboo as it perhaps is viewed
04:18now. Their parents at first weren't keen on the idea, but they did resign themselves to the fact
04:23that their boys would hitchhike home. Nothing had ever happened, so why wouldn't they trust it?
04:29The late 1960s was considered to be relatively safe. I remember doing it myself in the early 70s,
04:35and you wouldn't have given it a second thought. Now it's a different thing entirely.
04:43Tuesday 23rd of April 1968, Roy leaves school as normal at 3.30, and he gets the bus. He gets
04:50the bus
04:51for the first part of his journey, but determined to save up for this much sought-after bike, he decides
04:56to pocket the rest of the cash for himself, and he's seen on a lay-by near Chessington, trying to
05:01thumb a lift.
05:04However, that evening, Roy doesn't return home.
05:08As the hours ticked by, Dennis and Hillary started becoming worried about where their youngest boy was.
05:14Perhaps he was out playing with his friends for the first few hours, that's what they thought,
05:17but as the evening grew later, they decided to phone the police and report Roy as missing.
05:23So having called the police, they came round to take a missing person report from Roy's parents,
05:29but they did nothing further that evening, assuming that he was staying with friends and he would turn
05:33up the following morning. Back then, this was probably the sort of thing that police would have done,
05:37because it was so unusual for somebody to go missing, especially a child who was hitchhiking home,
05:42and they just assumed he would return home when he'd woken up in the morning at his friend's house.
05:48When Roy still hasn't come home by the next day, police are now very active in their search.
05:53They're taking descriptions of him to the local Chessington Zoo, where a young boy might have gone,
05:57or families who might have seen the young boy might have information. They take his description
06:02and his information to the local area of Toll, to see if anyone has seen him there.
06:06They speak to local bus drivers, but they don't get any critical information.
06:12Police would have asked everything about him, what he looked like, what his interests were,
06:16particularly what he was wearing at that time, his route home, where the likelihood he might be.
06:22They put up posters and started to talk to people about if they'd seen Roy at any point.
06:27They also checked the military pillboxes to see if by any chance he had fallen asleep in one,
06:31or was hiding in one, but there was no sign of Roy.
06:36Police threw a whole net around that area of Surrey, stopping cars on the street,
06:41just questioning everybody, producing pictures to try and get some sort of lead or some sort of effort.
06:46Media obviously was an important outlet for him, local newspapers, even local TV news.
06:51Anything that could put the picture of Roy in front of the public to see if that produced any sort
06:57of response.
06:58But as the days went on, the pressure was on, a missing schoolboy, every day that goes by,
07:03people start fearing the worst.
07:06Once you start to publicise this, then people help join in, try to provide information wherever possible.
07:13It was Brocombe, Dorking, all around that area, was very much a community,
07:18and the police at that time could rely on that community to help them whatever way they could.
07:25With every passing hour, the Fowleys must have just thought, minds must have raced,
07:29the imagination got wild. The worst, obviously, scenarios were playing over themselves.
07:35It just got worse and worse and worse, the pressure higher and higher and higher.
07:38What had happened to their lad? It's a horrible situation for anybody to be in.
07:44Three days later, everyone's worst fears are confirmed.
07:49So the search continues for the next three days. People are going more and more concerned about
07:54where Roy may be. And then three days later, on the 26th of April, the unthinkable happened.
07:59A forestry worker working on Lord Breaverbrook's estate found Roy's body.
08:04The boy's body is found in a wooded copse near Mickleham. Forestry workers spot the red jacket of the
08:11school uniform in the dense undergroves, then move towards it. They horribly discover this young boy
08:18found murdered underneath it.
08:21So, interestingly, the forest worker had been working in that area in the morning. He'd gone
08:26off to take a break and had come back later on in the day. And that's when he had found
08:30Roy,
08:31leading to the suggestion that Roy had been put there very recently.
08:35Police sealed off the area where the body had been discovered. Now, a missing person inquiring
08:40suddenly escalated into a murder hunt. Examination of the body, the pathologist told them that
08:44not only had Roy been strangled, possibly with a ligature, the police believed it was in fact
08:49quite possibly his own school time, but that he had been brutally sexually abused, in fact, raped.
08:58The police have a tough job, and any policeman will tell you one of the worst aspects of his job
09:02is having to go to a family, particularly parents of someone who has died in tragic circumstances,
09:09and break the news. It is a very, very difficult job, and you can just imagine not only the reaction
09:14of the police who are having to sit down with the parents, but the parents themselves. Finally,
09:18they have the news they'd been dreading for so many days. Child murders were almost unheard of.
09:23When a child goes missing, let alone is found dead, there's an absolute shock wave through the
09:28community, through the wider community, even across the country. The ultimate murder of Roy
09:33Tuthill was a real front page news, and people were looking at each other in the street thinking,
09:38how could this happen here? Surrey police are under intense pressure to locate a child rapist and
09:45murderer, and deliver justice for Roy's family. But will they succeed?
10:02On 23 April 1968, 14-year-old Roy Tuthill disappears in the quiet village of Brockham in Surrey. Three days
10:11later,
10:12his body is found outside Cherkley Court in Mickleham. He has been sexually assaulted and strangled.
10:20Just three days after Roy first disappeared, his family get the most upsetting, most awful news that
10:26you can imagine. A young boy's body has been found.
10:30The parents of this murdered schoolboy, utterly distraught, their lives completely ruined. Roy's father,
10:37Dennis, was to die within a year or two, no doubt of a broken heart. I'm sure whatever reason he
10:42died
10:43would have been exasperated by what had happened. Hillary was to die 20, 30 years later. There's no
10:48comeback here. There's no way you can make this up. It's always part of your life.
10:54Officers secure the scene to preserve crucial evidence.
10:59This isn't an area where something like this has ever happened before. This is forests close to
11:03the estate of Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron who was part of Winston Churchill's war
11:09cabinet. So police at that time in the late 1960s don't have the DNA and forensic capabilities that
11:15we have today. But police work in terms of boots on the ground is very much the same. They cordon
11:20off
11:20the area, they seal the scene, they speak to anyone that's been through the area, and they're busy
11:25knocking on doors asking, did you see anything? Have you seen this missing boy?
11:30It was a country lane, for want of a better term. There was metal railings, metal fence either side,
11:38and the body was actually about a couple of yards just over the fence. Slightly concealed, but not overly
11:45concealed. So there was no great effort. No houses nearby, no witnesses nearby. And it looked as though
11:52it was a sort of hurried dump, if that made sense. You know, no great effort was taken to conceal
11:57the body.
11:58The police were working on the theory that this had to be someone who had a previous MO for picking
12:03up
12:03boys and sexually abusing them and then disposing of them. They didn't think this was a single one-off
12:10opportunist crime, that this was someone who had a pathway and knew how to do this. The fear of course
12:17that the community was a child killer on the loose. All the pressure that they were under didn't change
12:21the fact that they had so little to go on. It was not impossible for someone to have picked up
12:26this boy,
12:26sexually abused him, killed him, left the county, left the area, could have gone to any other part of
12:32Britain and just disappeared way out beyond the reach of Surrey Police. Investigators begin their
12:40inquiries within the local community. Surrey Police brought in officers from over the county who were
12:46engaged in house-to-house inquiries, trying to identify Roy's last movements etc. The SIO at that time,
12:53Paddy Doyle. I know that this was very personal to Paddy because Paddy had a son of the same age
12:58and it
12:58really was a case of trying to trace witnesses, identify Roy's potential last movements and appeal
13:04for people to come forward. Police have now got 150 officers on the scene and they are now interviewing
13:11people at mass scale. They complete 10,300 interviews in a very short amount of time. These interviews,
13:19there could be anything from sort of 20, 30 minutes to several hours. They interviewed pretty much
13:24anybody that might have seen anything in that area. So police had very little to go on at this point,
13:30so they put up posters in the area to ask if anybody had seen anything suspicious and a bus driver
13:36came
13:36forward to say there had been an Austin Westminster parked in the lay-by where he should have been able
13:41to
13:41pull his bus into at the relevant time that Roy disappeared. A boy matching Roy's description was seen
13:48leaning into that window. The driver was leaning across speaking back to him. This man was described
13:53as being short, stocky with white grayish hair. The same car had been reported seen near where the body
14:00was dumped. One of the most significant details about this car, not only is it a gray silver Austin
14:08Westminster, which is quite a distinctive vehicle, but it has also got new registration plates on it. In the
14:13late 60s, the British government decided to have yellow registration plates on the back of a car
14:18and white registration plates on the front of a car. This car has those white and yellow registration plates.
14:25So following the posters being put up for information, a lady came forward to say that at
14:30about half past four on the relevant day, she had seen a boy matching Roy's description, hitchhiking.
14:36And she had said to him, being concerned, she had said, there were plenty of buses passing here.
14:40You don't have to hitchhike. But Roy, being unconcerned, said, oh, I'll be absolutely fine.
14:44So she left and she went to do some grocery shopping. And when she came back about 20 minutes
14:49later, Roy was gone, suggesting that in that time span, he had got into a vehicle.
14:55So police carry out an exhaustive search of anybody that owns an Austin Westminster. And in those days,
15:01this is a manual search in every sense of the word. You've got to get the phone book out,
15:05you've got to have paper records. You've got to go through, find somebody's phone number,
15:09phone them, speak to them, go around to their address, record it all on separate bits of paper,
15:14and then it all goes back into case files. This is an exhaustive search. And in the end,
15:18it proved a fruitless one. With the car search yielding no results,
15:23police turned to a newly emerging field of investigation.
15:28Forensic science was still in its infancy, really, when it comes to helping police detectives
15:33in the late 60s. And all the forensic examination of the scene and the body was able to show
15:39was a blood stain on Roy's trousers. Problem was that the blood stain could only narrow it
15:45down to either blood group A or blood group O. Now, unfortunately, those are the two most common
15:51blood groups in the world. So the police were not given any help, really. Certainly,
15:56when you judge it by modern times, by what they found at the scene.
16:01They would have spoken to anyone who they considered as a potential suspect and eliminated them. Did they
16:06have any firm idea as to who was responsible? Absolutely not. You know, they had no fingerprints
16:12or anything else like that that could have identified the suspect from. So even if they had a suspect,
16:18trying to try that suspect down to the scene and to the murder, unless there's witnesses, may have been
16:24an uphill struggle. Fibres at that time wasn't a science. You know, you're talking about 1968,
16:30you're talking about fingerprints and the fact you had a blood type. They were the most important
16:35aspects of forensic recovery that they had. Fibres wasn't one of the considerations.
16:43In 1968, nobody ever thought of a sex offenders register. This wasn't to come in for many decades.
16:49So there was no actual list of known sexual deviants. If the police were then trying to trace around the
16:56country, those who had committed sexual offences, they would have to make individual inquiries to
17:01each individual police force, which of course would take forever. And of course, many police forces
17:06couldn't be bothered to cooperate with over a crime that wasn't committed in their area. It was a very
17:10haphazard approach to dealing with sex crimes, partially because these sorts of sex crimes,
17:18I wouldn't say unheard of, but they were rare. And police were more concerned with more routine
17:22crimes, which kept on recurring. TV reconstructions of high profile cases are a familiar thing for TV
17:29viewers today and a familiar thing on social media and TV news. However, at that time, they hadn't been
17:34done. And desperate to get a breakthrough in this case, Philip Doyle, the lead inspector on this case,
17:40creates the first TV reconstruction of this boy's final moment. He recruits his own son to walk up and
17:48down, similar to Roy Tuttle, in the same uniform, along the same road, in a bid to try and jog
17:54the memory
17:55of anybody who might watch that broadcast and anybody who might have seen something on that fateful day.
18:02Yes, the police were now under serious pressure. They'd never lost a child in these sort of
18:07circumstances, but they had no leads. The bloodstain wouldn't have helped them a great deal.
18:12The sightings that had come up had really amounted to nothing between the possible connection with the
18:19driver of an Austin Westminster Mark II, which was like looking like a needle in a haystack across the
18:25country, and the fact that he was hitchhiking home. They had nothing else to go on.
18:30Detectives pursue other lines of inquiry, learning of a potential suspect whose profile
18:36bears similarities to this case. They then start to look at similar crimes and similar offenders.
18:43They know that this individual has a predilection for young boys and has a sexual interest in school
18:48boys. And so they head to the north of Scotland, Aberdeen, where police have apprehended a man who has
18:54been sexually assaulting a young boy there. In custody that day is Brian Lunn Field.
19:01Field himself said he had nothing to do with the Surrey incident, nothing to do with Tuttle's
19:06disappearance. Despite the obvious similarities of the two attacks, there was nothing that a Surrey
19:11police could take from this connection at all.
19:21So the investigation went on for years with very little leads. Scotland Yard were called in to
19:27assist. They couldn't find anything to further the investigation. Every now and then they would put out
19:32an appeal for information and somebody would come forward with something fresh, but it never led
19:37anywhere. Although it remained high profile, they never got anywhere with finding out who had killed Roy.
19:43There does come a period in time where you've exhausted all of your inquiries that you can conduct,
19:48you've looked at all of the leads that you've got, they've all come to a dead end,
19:51then you have to start shutting things down. Because you start shutting things down doesn't mean to say
19:57it comes to an end. And of course over the years, if they had other pieces of information coming in,
20:02they would take the files off the shelves and they would pursue these pieces of information to see
20:07if they could identify who was responsible. Sadly, they were unlucky, unfortunate and just couldn't
20:13identify a suspect. By 1996, almost 30 years after schoolboy Roy Tuttle's unsolved murder,
20:21his parents had now passed on without knowing who was responsible for their son's death. His brother had
20:26moved to America to start a new life and police were still working away trying to catch this
20:32killer. Abilities in DNA and forensics had moved on. Studying again the trousers Roy wore on the day
20:38he was murdered, they were able to deliver a DNA profile and a breakthrough in this historic and unsolved case.
20:48Finally, police have a genetic profile of the killer. But will this breakthrough lead to an arrest?
21:19By 1996, both of Roy's parents had passed away. Colin had moved to America. His, at that point, was the
21:27longest unsolved child murder case in Britain.
21:30That wouldn't be the case for much longer though. In that year, cold case reviews were being looked at again.
21:37This was after the introduction of the DNA database a year earlier in 1995. Forensic technology had advanced in the
21:43three decades since Roy's murder.
21:45The cold case review came at the perfect time. In December of 1996, a sample was recovered from Roy's trousers.
21:52It was semen.
21:53So now police had a DNA profile of Roy's killer. They just needed a name and a face to match.
22:00In the late 90s, suddenly DNA sourcing exploded. The science suddenly took huge leaps forward.
22:08Particularly it helped in forensic police work. Suddenly police didn't just have a blood group to go on.
22:13They had all the integral patterns of blood and semen to work on, which produced like a passport.
22:19It really could narrow doubt to just single people. Despite this progress, investigators are unable to
22:27match the DNA to a suspect. Then in 2000, a cold case unit re-examines the case.
22:34I first heard about Roy Tuttle and the murder of Roy Tuttle in August of 2000.
22:40I was basically the head of CID for Surrey. We were going through a quiet period and one of the
22:46DCIs
22:46popped his head into the office and said, do you mind if we start looking at the cold case? And
22:51the cold
22:51case was the one of Roy Tuttle. We had time on our hands, so we gave the authority for him
22:57to pull out
22:57all the case file and start seeing what we could find, if there's anything further we could do.
23:03It's a small team because it was a cold case. And in fairness, I don't solve crimes. The team solve
23:10the crime. I'm just the head of the team. There was the DCI who was like a dog with a
23:16bone and they
23:17collected all the paperwork. And what they actually did was, there was a thing called the National
23:22Crime Faculty at that time in 2000. This was down at Brams Hill and they had started a section called
23:28the series crimes analysis section and they had started doing the analysis of all sex crimes and
23:34suspects throughout the country, bringing all the information together. They put the files that we
23:40had, we put the information that we had in respect of Roy Tuttle into the screen series crimes and
23:45analysis section. And they actually came out with the report and they had identified Brian Field
23:50as a potential suspect. Brian Field re-emerges as a lead suspect. Detectives look into his past to get
23:59a better understanding of the man. Brian Lundfield is born in 1936 in Market Raisin, a market town with
24:08its own race course in a largely rural area. He doesn't live with his parents, they put him into foster
24:14care
24:14and he's put into a home called Lynne Wode House. So Paul and Ruby Field were actually very well known.
24:22He had used all his money to buy a home that he could then adopt children into. So Brian had
24:2714 siblings,
24:29there were 15 of them all together living in this house and it was like a bit of an experiment
24:32really,
24:33but seemed to the outside world to be absolutely perfect. Paul Field was such a familiar name in
24:40media at that time. Not only was he awarded an OBE for his services to young children, but he was
24:45singled out to appear on This Is Your Life, which was an enormous program in the 60s presented by
24:50Eamon Andrews, primetime ITV, anything between 13-15 million people would tune in to watch the story of
24:57this man's life. He was a familiar figure in the media and on television. Brian Field was doing national
25:03service, but he was given leave to attend the filming of this program along with his 13-14 other
25:08siblings to support his foster father and was there on television in his military uniform.
25:16On the outside, in the press, the home has a glowing reputation. On the inside, for many of the
25:22boys there, this is not the case. Other boys at the home accuse Brian of abusing them and say in
25:29later
25:29years, Brian had an obsession, a predilection for sexual abuse. Age 15, Brian leaves the foster home and after
25:37a brief spell in the military, he goes to work for the milk marketing board. Faithfully, this is a job
25:43that allows him to move easily around different parts of the country. He sells milk machinery around
25:48the west country and for a spell in the late 60s, he also lives in Surrey.
25:55Brian Field had a long criminal record. He started in 1969 when he was in his 30s with a gross
26:02indecency
26:03charge. In 1972, that case in Aberdeen where he'd abducted a young 14-year-old boy, sexually abused him.
26:11The boy managed to escape, but he was jailed for that.
26:14In 1986, he was jailed for four years after abducting two boys aged 13 and 16,
26:21though thankfully they did manage to flee.
26:24He put them in the back of his car and as he's driving along, he took a tire iron out
26:29and said, right, you two, take your clothes off. The boys, scared witless, managed to fight and
26:36struggle and get out the car as it was driving along the road. And then Field was later identified
26:42as the driver arrested and convicted for that. Had these boys not managed to get out of the car,
26:48they would have been dead. Here's a man who lacked complete empathy and was bordering on the fact of
26:53being a psychopath. So with all these convictions, it meant that Brian was well known to police by
27:01this point. He was described as a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, a hard-working man when he was
27:06sober,
27:06but give him a drink and he turned into somebody completely different. So this made him prime suspect
27:11really for the disappearance of Roy in 1968. Now in his 60s, Brian Field lives in the small town of
27:20Solihal near Birmingham, where he's a respected member of the community.
27:25Brian Field was like many paedophiles in so much that he was intensely devious and had two sides to
27:32his character. Outwardly, he was charming to people, to his family and friends. He was seen as a hard
27:38worker, but his more sinister side would come out, particularly when he was drunk, and that was he had
27:43a vicious and violent temper. From the 80s and 90s, he was working as a gardener and outdoors as a
27:50laborer, and he built up quite a physique. So this was an extremely dangerous character in that he had
27:55a violent temper, he was very fit and strong, and he had paedophilic tendencies. This was a horrendous
28:02cocktail and put every schoolboy in danger. With the evidence aligning, the cold case unit is
28:09determined to link Brian to the murder of Roy Tuttle. Having identified him as a potential suspect was
28:16one thing, being able to prove it was a different thing entirely. So we started making inquiries at
28:23Brian Field. We found out that he was living up in Solihal near Birmingham. And then at the same
28:28time, we started to chase up if there was any forensics. We found that Roy's clothing had been
28:33put away at the forensic science laboratory up in Huntingdon, in the freezer. They dug the clothes out.
28:39We asked for an analysis to be made of the clothing. And much to our joy, much to our surprise,
28:47there was a DNA hit. And the DNA hit came back to Brian Lundfield.
28:54In September 1999, Brian Field was arrested in Birmingham for drink driving. After the
29:00introduction of the database, it was mandatory to give a DNA sample after being arrested. In the year 2000,
29:06the DNA sample recovered from Roy's trousers matched Field's DNA sample taken when he was arrested.
29:14So we had this sort of parallel. Intelligence suggested it could have been. DNA said it was.
29:21And it's a case of then of a sharp intake of breath, because you're now looking at 30 years has
29:27passed and you're now on the track of a killer. So we set up surveillance up in Birmingham. We started
29:33to
29:34watch, identify where Field was living. And we were watching him. I think he was a 64-year-old man,
29:41who was very fit and agile. So it was then a case of getting all of our eggs in one
29:46basket,
29:47getting all the evidence together, and then deciding, right, we're going to go and arrest them.
29:52Police immediately elated by this sudden explosive new breakthrough. And they placed
29:58Field immediately under surveillance, just to try and get a feel of who he is and then amass all the
30:04evidence that they have in order to finally go and arrest him. We lost sight of him for a brief
30:11period in time. And I remember jumping in one of the cars and we hot-footed it up to Birmingham.
30:17And as we
30:17got to Solihull, they had identified that he was in his flat and he was arrested there. Members of the
30:24community are stunned at his arrest for such a horrific crime. After he's been released from
30:31prison in the eighties, he settled into the Birmingham area. His marriage broke up. Three
30:36children no longer live with it, but he pursued his life as a gardener, as a laborer, often for cash
30:42in
30:42hand, which meant that he didn't have to pay tax or he virtually disappeared. But those who knew him,
30:47who lived around him, thought, what a great guy. He was down the pub, buy a drink, amiable,
30:51outgoing, a perfect neighbour. Nobody who lived in his area, in his street or knew him, had any idea
30:58whatsoever about this man's past. He exploited trust and normalcy as a way to mask his deviance
31:06and avoided detection for decades. His arrest created genuine shock among those who believe they knew him.
31:15He was taken to Solihull Police Station, where he was booked in, and then he was driven south down to
31:21Surrey. And we had each stage planned out. There was going to be no conversations in the car.
31:28Everything was going to be done exactly by the book. So we got him down to Surrey, and we had
31:33prepared
31:34an interview strategy with him. Obviously, you've been arrested for the murder of a boy called Roy
31:43Lindsay Tuttle. Now that boy was a Kingston Grammar School boy, and he went missing on his way home
31:51from school in April of 1968. Did you ever give any school boys a lift in your car at all?
31:59No. In 1960? No. No. No. Are you quite sure about that? Yeah, positive. Did you ever stop and talk
32:05to
32:06any school boys and engage them in any kind of conversation? No. No. Did you murder Roy Tuttle?
32:12No. No. I did not. I don't even know. I've never seen him. I'm going to show you a photograph
32:18of this boy,
32:19OK? OK? OK? And that's a copy of Roy when he went missing?
32:27No, no, never. I mean, he looks like a lot of lads, really.
32:34Yeah. No, I've never seen him before. You've never seen him? No.
32:38You're 100% sure you've never seen this boy before? Yeah. Yeah.
32:43And he was sat down and faced with all the evidence the police had accrued,
32:48billion-to-one DNA evidence, his past record of identical attacks. I think the police immediately
32:53expected that Field would crumble. He was now in his mid-60s, and he could see that,
32:58surely, that there was no way out. In fact, Field accepted his past behaviour, but said that that
33:04was all gone, nothing like that now. And what's more, he had no knowledge of who this Roy Tuttle was,
33:11had never been in that area at that particular time, all the way back in 1968. Forget it,
33:16I've nothing to do with it. Police have his DNA, but they want a confession.
33:22Will Brian Field admit to the sexual assault and murder of Roy Tuttle back in 1968?
33:41More than 30 years after the murder of Roy Tuttle, police finally have DNA evidence
33:47linking Brian Field to the crime. But when questioned, he denies all accountability.
33:54Police now have Field in custody, and they put to him that they have a match, a DNA profile that
34:00links him to the murder of Roy Tuttle in 1968. Field announces, yes, I did have an interest in
34:07young boys. Yes, I've been convicted of multiple assaults on young boys and the kidnap of young
34:12boys. But I don't know anything about this case. This was not me.
34:17The lack of response from Field may have taken police by surprise, but they immediately went
34:22off to magistrates to apply for an extension to the custody time limits, i.e. to keep him under
34:28arrest for longer before they had to make the decision whether to charge him or to release him.
34:32At the end of the second day of questioning, they told Field that tomorrow we're going to have to
34:36take fresh DNA evidence from you and match that up. The last thing we were going to do that night
34:44was get a DNA sample from him. So we requested a DNA sample from him, which he supplied, and then
34:50we let him stew overnight. And he obviously started to put two and two together. So therefore,
34:56the following day when he was brought out for interview, he sat down, I've got to tell you something.
35:03He confessed in detail to the abduction, rape, and murder of Roy Tuttle.
35:09I'm sorry, I've misled you all the time.
35:15I didn't, you know, I've been to prison.
35:19I'm sorry.
35:24Why? Why? Look at me.
35:31It's important now, for everyone concerned, that we finish this.
35:36Yeah, it's gone a long, long time.
35:39Yeah, yeah. Okay.
35:42I was driving along the, the road, and um, I saw this, you know, come, get off the bus.
35:52I knew that. He's something for a lick. I'm sure he's something for a lick. He's still there.
35:58But I stopped and he got in.
36:03And now, that's the way he's going.
36:08You're in the car.
36:10Yeah. What do you do?
36:13Right, I'll tighten and go get in.
36:16Okay, how did you just do that?
36:20You went over the front seat.
36:25And I tried to do it on the front of the crossing on the seat,
36:31for you to get dressed again.
36:35And I'll just put it on the tie on his neck and just tighten it.
36:49Can you demonstrate where you hated it?
36:52And put it around his neck and just tighten it right now.
36:56You just see a clean box.
36:58that they would cast him for air and I just carried out and suddenly he went like
37:05and he hardly got out, spent himself on putting him in the boat and then went home.
37:19You've lived through this secret for 30-odd years, haven't you?
37:26Have you feeling?
37:26Yeah.
37:30He proceeded to tell us exactly how he picked up Roy Tuttle, how he got him in the car,
37:38how he tried to force him to perform more sex and how he strangled him.
37:43It's actually quite chilling to watch how Brian Field describes how he strangled Roy Tuttle
37:53and then of course he put him in the boot of the car and he kept him in the car
37:56for a few days.
37:57We've got the DNA, we've got his admissions, etc. But was it possible for him to put him in the
38:02boot of a mini?
38:03So we got a mini, we got someone about the size of Roy Tuttle, we tried to keep him in
38:07the mini to make sure it was physically possible.
38:09So we started to follow up on the results of his interview to try and find some physical corroboration as
38:16much as we had the DNA and his admissions, etc.
38:20So an awful part about this is that Brian admits that after dumping Roy's body, he then drives to the
38:26hospital to visit his wife who has just given birth to their child.
38:31The fact that he's going to see his wife in the hospital who's just given birth and he picks a
38:36young boy up and kills him tends to suggest that lack of empathy, the lack of feeling, the fact that
38:42he's, you know, psychopathic tendencies, no emotion.
38:48Field's complete lack of emotion just highlighted the fact that here was a callous killer, completely no interest whatsoever in
38:57the knock-on effect of his sexual activity and that a family had been completely destroyed, utterly destroyed.
39:03In contrast to the grief that he had caused, Field's life just went on as normal.
39:08After compiling the full body of evidence, authorities moved to prosecute Brian Field for the murder of Roy Tuttle.
39:16What we had was a case file which was substantial because of all the information that had been gathered over
39:23the years.
39:24And of course, in the year 2000, 2001, there was a different way of presenting a case at court.
39:30You had a thing called disclosure, whereas we had to disclose any material that could potentially undermine a prosecution case.
39:37And of course, within these files, there was massive potential and it had not been for the DNA and the
39:43admission.
39:43But nevertheless, you still got to go through this disclosure process.
39:47So, we bought this scanner that did something like about a thousand pages a minute and we scanned every single
39:53document into this scanner.
39:55So, therefore, we had a composite file from the paperwork who put it, made it electronic.
39:59And that meant we were then able to disclose everything to the defence solicitor who was representing Brian Field.
40:07So, eventually, the trial date arrives and Brian is taken to the Old Bailey where his case is heard.
40:12Brian pleads guilty to the murder of Roy Tuttle but denies the sexual assault.
40:17And the reason for this is that he will know that he could be given extra time if he admitted
40:21to a sexual assault on top of the murder charge.
40:24So, he only admits to the murder and is found guilty of the murder of Roy Tuttle.
40:29He didn't plead guilty to the sexual assault.
40:32Had he pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and he'd gone to prison as a sex offender like that,
40:38then, of course, the regime within prison would have treated him differently.
40:41So, being a murderer is one thing.
40:43Being a murderer with serious sexual assault on a young boy would have been something else.
40:48In November 2001, Brian Field is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 14-year-old Roy Tuttle.
40:57He would serve 22 years.
41:01The judge's open court remarks emphasised the importance of DNA technology
41:05and how it was essential for bringing justice for Roy's family.
41:10Field's confession was the first time that the police realised that what Field was driving was a white Mini,
41:18not an Austin-Westminster Mark II.
41:20All that period of time searching for Austin-Westminster Mark II had been completely wasted.
41:27Police at the time obviously weren't to know that. That was the only lead they had.
41:31But it's come as a blow to the pride of the police that they had been chasing a complete red
41:35herring for so long.
41:38There was a lot of relief the fact that Field was convicted.
41:42There was a lot of relief within the team that he was convicted.
41:45But there was also a lot of relief is that Field was a predator from the day that he lived
41:51in the foster home
41:53to the day that he died was a danger to society.
41:57So there was a great relief the fact that after the conviction, Field couldn't harm anyone else.
42:04This was a huge story for the media. Not only was it the longest running cold case success,
42:09and that it was finally a killer court after 33 years,
42:13but the throwback to those of us who were there in the 60s,
42:18the newspapers, the black and white pictures of Roy looking at this schoolboy,
42:22pictures of what had happened in Chessington in 1968,
42:26remarkable how evocative those pictures can be.
42:30Field was a persistent, aggressive paedophile
42:33who'd proven that he was capable of taking schoolboys off the streets and abusing them.
42:38This was somebody that kidnapped two young boys after Roy Tuttle's death.
42:42Thankfully, they escaped and had abused another 14 year old boy on another occasion.
42:47Police looked at his profile and were linking him to any number of assaults
42:51and any other number of missing children for cases that they hadn't found.
42:55But as yet, they don't currently have the DNA breakthrough to convict him on any other charges.
43:00Field is a practiced psychopathic offender.
43:03He is able to behave without any empathy, without any humanity.
43:07Even though he's able to keep up a veneer of respectability as a working man, a family man,
43:12he is somebody that was an ever-present danger to children.
43:15And somebody under drink or without drink was able to act on these inhuman,
43:21beastly impulses in the middle of the day.
43:23This is somebody that snatched the child off the road at the end of the school day.
43:27This is somebody that acted in broad daylight, that acted in public,
43:30and acted even though he had multiple sentences for this kind of behaviour.
43:34This is somebody that was not going to be stopped.
43:38Field ultimately died behind bars at the age of 87 in 2024 at HMP Full Sutton from natural causes.
43:47A serenity he denied his victims.
43:50You meet with the brother and you meet with Paddy Doyle
43:54and you saw what it meant to them.
43:57And you then get this stark realisation that after 30 years if this was solvable,
44:02then potentially any cold case is solvable.
44:05All we really have to do is look hard enough and look for the opportunities and look for the clues.
44:12And it gave me confidence in going forward that cold cases are actually worth investigating.
44:20Because had we not arrested Brian Field then he would have continued to offend and potentially kill other people.
44:28Despite finally closing the case on his murder,
44:31there weren't many left alive who knew Roy to witness justice being served.
44:37So tragically the parents of Roy never got to see justice done.
44:41They never got to learn who had killed their child.
44:44But the reaction to Brian being found guilty or even being accused of this crime was incredible.
44:50He had built a whole new life in Birmingham and people there thought he was just wonderful.
44:55He was a regular at the pub.
44:58They had a whip round for his 60th birthday, something which was unheard of.
45:02He was a really popular man.
45:04And when people heard of his arrest, they absolutely said the police had got the wrong person.
45:09Could not believe that he could be responsible for anything quite so heinous as this murder of a young boy.
45:16The Roy Tuttle story has stayed with me for countless years.
45:21When he was killed, he was 14 and I was 12.
45:25I had a bike, I had a train set, the two things he had set his heart on as well.
45:29And I went to school in 1968 on a bus.
45:31And I look back on all those years, how lucky I was to lead a life that I have.
45:38And how lucky I've been to live as many years as I have.
45:41And if only Roy had even a slice of the luck that I had,
45:45he would never have ended in such a gruesome, degrading, humiliating, terrifying murder that he had to undergo.
46:13I'm Finally.
46:31You
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